The Light Beyond The Mountains

Chapter 34: Are We Human?

(Cover image © Tristan Maduro)

Chapter 34: Are We Human?

I know where I am - the smoke, the atmosphere you can cut with a knife, the fizzing light socket - none of it has changed. As with all the other times, I try to turn but I can’t - the countdown has started and I’ve no choice but to stare through the thick glass at what is about to unfold, with the tree, as ever, demanding my attention.

“… six, five, four …”

I don’t want to see what happens next. If I can only turn, I’ll reach the door and escape the suffocating air. I try again and something that’s never happened before happens now: the whispering that comes to me from the back of the room - this bunker with its damp walls and low ceiling - distils into a low male voice: “When we drop our bomb on invading troops or an enemy city, the Anglo-Americans will be forced to decide whether it’s worth continuing the war or ending it reasonably…”

I turn to find myself staring into the eyes of a man in a pinstriped suit. They narrow and stare back at me through thick spectacles. His mouth twists into a smile.

“Do I know you?” I ask.

The man says nothing, merely points, directing my focus back to the glass. As I turn, the countdown hits zero, there’s a flash, the tree disintegrates, and I awake.

Later that day, I found him where my instincts told me I would: not in old photos of Manhattan Project scientists, but in Todd Rider’s Forgotten Creators. The face that stared back at me from the only photo Rider had been able to find of him was Kurt Diebner’s. In my research on the German bomb, it had been his partner, Schumann, I’d focused on. Schumann’s name - his alleged relationship to the classical composer, Robert Schumann - had seduced me into thinking he had been the more influential of the two.

But Diebner’s legacy, I could see, was remarkable - and terrifying in its implications.